‹/› API OF THE WEEK

API of the Week: BetterWorks Boosts Business Performance

As digital transformation continues to gain traction, companies are looking for a competitive edge only achievable by integrating leading edge software solutions into their business processes. BetterWorks provides enterprise software to easily manage strategic plans, collaborative goals and ongoing performance conversations. Its Business Operating System is built on Goal Science insights and operational research to help high-performing companies execute more effectively.

This past March, the company raised $20 million in a series B from Emergence Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and 8VC, among others.

"At Emergence Capital, we have invested in Salesforce, Yammer, Box, Veeva and SuccessFactors, and while evaluating the human capital management landscape we became convinced that BetterWorks is poised to become one of the next iconic enterprise companies," said Jason Green, Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital.

"We believe the combination of its product vision, cadre of passionate enterprise customers and talented team will enable BetterWorks to break away from the competition in the employee engagement and emerging performance development domains."

Last week the company rolled out an API to connect all data across the workplace and they cited examples for future development:

ConsumerAffairs, a third-party consumer news and reviews website and customer engagement SaaS provider for brands, will populate its business intelligence platform with goal data from BetterWorks.

Volusion, a leading all-in-one ecommerce software and shopping cart solution provider, will use the API to update goal progress directly from its agile project management software.

Advance Digital, Inc., a part of the Advance Local group, is responsible for digital strategy, innovation and development of multiplatform news and information products and is pulling goal data from BetterWorks into its issue and project tracking tool JIRA.

Instructure, a SaaS provider dedicated to helping organizations develop and manage face-to-face and online learning experiences, is creating a check-in integration where goal progress is automatically updated when Instructure courses are completed.

We were fascinated so we conducted an API of the Week interview with Vipul Galal, product manager. This interview is being done in conjunction with the All About The API conference to be held this July in Las Vegas.

What APIs do you have available?

Currently we have three categories of endpoints available through our API program. We have a user data endpoint, a goal data endpoint and a goal progress endpoint. The first two allow developers to extract people and goal data from our platform, the third allows developing integrations to update goal progress.

Later, we’ll expand the API to include creating and editing goals, as well as an endpoint around our performance management module.

What are the benefits/ solutions they help provide?

There are numerous benefits. The data in BetterWorks is very rich as it ties together company objectives and progress to people. The API makes all of this data available to third parties so they can run their own analysis and reporting. As an example, one of our customers has connected our API to their business intelligence platform to create new dashboards.

We have also opened up the way people can populate data within the BetterWorks platform. With our Progress endpoint, developers can build custom integrations to update goal data. This is especially useful, as BetterWorks can now put all of an organization's data into the context of a goal. One of our partners, Instructure, plans to connect their Learning Management System to BetterWorks, allowing users to link their courses with goals. As the user completes a course, their progress will automatically be reflected into their goals. This is great for our common users, as now all of their course work can be reflected and tracked as a part of their goals.

What new business opportunities do they potentially open up for your partners?

Companies go to great lengths to aggregate an enterprise’s data set and run analysis to gather insights. While these solutions are great, the data has limited context, so it's tough to discern any action from those insights. Now imagine those same data sets, but in the context of goals and people. The data immediately becomes actionable and infinitely richer.

Our API now makes this contextual data open to developers. We see opportunities for decision science, pattern mapping, resource planning and many other recommendation type services.

Why should developers/ decision makers choose to be part of your ecosystem?

We have Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of large to medium size enterprises in our portfolio. All of these companies are using BetterWorks to operate their company. BetterWorks has essentially become their nervous system. Developing solutions off the BetterWorks platform immediately gives developers direct access to the most important aspects of how their own company is moving forward.

What are some of the cooler solutions that have been developed using your APIs?

Our API just launched. We have one customer who has already integrated our platform to their business intelligence platform, and many customers who have begun exploring the API, so we excited to see what they build.

How do you market your API’s?

The most exciting way we’ll be marketing our API is through a hackathon that will be open to customers and anyone that wants to build a 3rd party API to connect with the BetterWorks platform. We’ll be hosting the hackathon onsite and virtually, so that anyone can participate and get help from our engineering team to build with our API. If you’re interested in participating in the hackathon, please email us.

Who is the "customer" for your API’s?

Our API is openly available to all BetterWorks customers. We are happy to partner with any ISV who would like access to BetterWorks to integrate their application with our platform.

Come see the world of APIs at All About The API. Our event will feature a variety of intensive hack-a-thons, in-depth company-focused workshops helping attendees understand the value propositions from key vendors, powerful keynotes, daily and nightly networking opportunities plus an exhibit hall full of companies demonstrating the latest innovations in today’s market place. Every business has to pay attention to the new opportunities they are presenting or potentially be displaced. We hope to see you July 18-21 2016 in Las Vegas!

This is the only event where you can network and see keynotes from these thought leaders: